Women underrepresented in film, study says

Thursday

Mar 13, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 13, 2014 at 11:00 AM

LOS ANGELES - It's a man's world - on-screen, anyway. The 100 top-grossing films of 2013 were overwhelmingly male, according to a new report by Martha Lauzen, a film professor at San Diego State University.

LOS ANGELES — It’s a man’s world — on-screen, anyway.

The 100 top-grossing films of 2013 were overwhelmingly male, according to a new report by Martha Lauzen, a film professor at San Diego State University. Just 15 percent of protagonists, 29 percent of major characters and 30 percent of all speaking characters were female.

The study looked at more than 2,300 characters in the 2013 films, and the lack of female representation — on-screen and behind the scenes — hasn’t substantially improved, Lauzen said.

“I would say that the film business is in a state of gender inertia,” she said in an interview. “ If you take a look at the numbers, you see basically we are in the same place we were about a decade ago.”

For example, in a similar study conducted in 2002, only 16 percent of the protagonists in the top 100 films of that year were women. That is 1 percent higher than in 2013.

“Women comprise 52 percent of population but make up only 15 percent of protagonists; that strikes me as a significant disconnect between the film world and the real world,” Lauzen said.

Some in the industry might counter that male leads reflect box-office reality — that male-driven movies make more money. But Lauzen said an earlier study of hers found that, when the budgets of films featuring female and male protagonists are equalized, “There is no substantial difference in box-office grosses or DVD sales.”

“Differences in earnings are due to differences in the size of budgets, not gender,” said Lauzen, who has looked at 300 films since 2002.

Indeed, female protagonists were at the center of recent top-grossing films such as Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock; The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, starring Jennifer Lawrence; and the animated Frozen, featuring the voices of Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel.

Only 13 percent of the top 100 films at the box office featured equal numbers of major female and male characters, or featured more female characters than male characters.